Recommended for any sports enthusiast and a must for golfers of all handicaps.
An exciting story of the “terror…absolute joy and absolute despair” that are the Ryder Cup matches.
Noted sports columnist and prolific author Feinstein (The Legends Club: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano, and an Epic College Basketball Rivalry, 2016, etc.) returns to the world of golf with this in-depth portrait of the dramatic 2016 Ryder Cup matches between the U.S. and European teams at the Hazeltine Golf Course in Minnesota. Golf fans love Feinstein’s books because he’s trusted by the pros and thus can give inside information no other journalist can capture, plus he has a flair for telling a great story. He’s been waiting 23 years to write a book about the Ryder Cup, and he covers a lot of material here. The author begins at the end of the matches, with Ryan Moore (the last American to make the team) putting to win the matches for the U.S., the first win since 2008. He provides a succinct history of the matches, which began in 1926, before moving on to more detailed tales about the most recent ones and the key players involved in them. Then it’s on to the 2016 competition. He provides terrific behind-the-scenes information about how Davis Love was chosen as team captain for the second time in a row as well as the scrap between Phil Mickelson and Tom Watson and how Love decided to implement a strategy similar to what captain Paul Azinger used in the American’s 2008 victory: the task force, which gave “the players the input they needed to be prepared to succeed.” The opening ceremony had seating for 1,500. There were some 45,000 on the course, and 30,000 stayed for the ceremony. Feinstein’s coverage of the actual matches only takes up about a quarter of the book, and his journalistic style of short, pithy paragraphs drives the narrative along at breakneck speed.
Recommended for any sports enthusiast and a must for golfers of all handicaps.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54109-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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